Welcome to Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS)

We are a global transdisciplinary network and collaborative community of concerned scholars, researchers, educators, practitioners, creative artists, and others. We wish to stimulate systemic change, globally and locally, to open space for dignity, mutual respect and esteem to take root and grow. Our goal is ending humiliating practices, preventing new ones from arising, and fostering healing from cycles of humiliation throughout the world.

We suggest that a frame of cooperation and shared humility is necessary — not a mindset of humiliation — if we wish to build a better world, a world of equal dignity for all.

We do our best to cultivate a relational climate characterized by dignity, walking our talk, and mutual growth. For more than a decade, our relational approach has been more than sustainable, it has offered a new model of collaborative action, a replenishing relational-organizational climate that is constantly evolving and growing with — rather than at the expense of — the people involved. Michael Britton wrote on July 18, 2015: "I feel fortunate to have found a home in HumanDHS where the labors of inquiry, honesty, integrity, dignity, trust and trustworthiness, humility are at the heart of who we are and what we do."

We are currently around 1,000 personally invited members, with more than 2,000 more people supporting our work, more than 6,000 people on our address list, and our website is being accessed by ca. 40,000 people from more than 180 countries per year since its inception in 2003. A new educational initiative emerging from the network since 24th June 2011 is the World Dignity University (WDU) initiative to which anyone interested in educating or learning on dignity is invited to contribute with ideas. Dignity Press, with its imprint World Dignity University Press, is flourishing since 2012. The nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015, 2016, and 2017 gave all our members great courage and has already been life-saving for some.

If you wish, please see here a short welcome video clip, the status of our work, and then enter our website in more depth here, or through the links on the upper left side of this page. We often use #dignism when we upload videos on YouTube (see also Evelin Lindner's channel).

When you click on the picture above, you see our 29th Annual Dignity Conference in Indore, India, 16th – 19th August 2017, titled 'Dignity in Times of Globalisation.'

Please be aware that our work is a labor of love and maintained entirely by volunteers who give their time and energy as a gift. All our efforts are pro bono. Since 2001, our work is continuously evolving, including this website, which came into being in 2003. Since 2011, also the websites of the World Dignity University (WDU) Initiative and our Dignity Press evolve. If you were to know about any dignity-IT-volunteers for our WDU platform, we would be very glad if you could introduce us! (Knowledge of Joomla would be essential, and the capability to program using Python, Django, databases, and html.)

News Headlines

Two kinds of news are listed here:
1. news from within our network
2. news from other sources that might be of interest for our network members